


What I Think

by orphan_account



Category: The City of Ember - Jeanne DuPrau
Genre: Death, Minor Character Death, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 14:51:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6243991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They were thrown into the hungry mouth where the borders of our town and the vast Unknown Regions met: Those two lips of craggy hard rock, hanging between them something yet unknown. Something you cannot taste... yet.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Warning for major FLUFF, a-ha. Seriously, this is just an oldie but a goodie. Please enjoy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What I Think

How do you quantify a warm hug?

A solicitous glance?

The concerned cluck of an elder who knows better?

How do you quantify that cool stillness of a living room in which you lie---you, sleeping, fingering blistering hot thermoses pressed against your belly to let your upset stomach settle down? Or the feel of your mother's fingers as she seeks for your temperature?

I know. You can taste it. But only when it's been taken from you--only then, with the plate returned to the kitchen and thrown down the garbage chute.

 _They_ were thrown into the hungry mouth where the borders of our town and the vast Unknown Regions met: Those two lips of craggy hard rock, hanging between them something yet unknown. Something you cannot taste. 

Yet.

I dream about that nightmare place every so often, even though I've made my peace with Ember long ago, from the moment we decided to take what we could amidst the abandonment of our City.

I sit up in bed usually, and Doon is awake. He catches my arm and tells me to calm down. 'What was it?' He'd ask. And I'd say nothing, too sick with terror or stunned with the relief of reality existing here, now. He'd tell me what I had been murmuring in my sleep: 'Not yet.'

Embarrassing.

But then sometimes, sometimes... a very few times, actually, that dream of the house above the shop comes to me, in the night:

I am home from school, the door opening to the sounds of frying dinner. The echoing babble of a daughter and mother-in-law bounces about the legs of the dinner table and the chairs, the sofa, the cabinets. And then there she is to greet me, only her head turned, her spine in profile a perfect S. Mother. Her smile is a smile with a capital S, as well. Coming in there is my grandmother, also to greet me.

And in my dreams her son, my father, materializes from somewhere in the house, too, and in the rush of _Welcome home_ s and _I'm back_ s and hugs and _Hi_ s and _Hello_ s, I can taste it. I taste it and am embraced by this unquantifiable thing that I know no one can live without, and it is warm. They tell me to Go and play as they settle back to their tasks, and I--my dream self--she turns, walks away with her back to them.

And next I turn, I am nineteen years old and sitting up in bed. My little sister, whom I raised with the flagging aid of my aging grandmother--and then, for a little while, all alone--is sleeping beside me in this safe place to which our people have egressed, to which all our efforts have brought us both against all odds and according to instruction, all at once. And--

And I cry in my bed whenever this dream comes.

I don't know.

Doon asked me once what the matter was, the first time he saw me this way. Wanting to understand. Wanting so hard. And that time I told him everything I've told you already, slowly in the quiet of much sleep and still night when you're allowed to taste bitterness in the full, alone. (Usually alone.) And he didn't say anything as he waited for me to fall asleep again.

…I get the feeling nowadays he didn't fall back to dreaming along with me.

Fiercely.

Uncompromisingly fierce.

I know from how I feel that they--my mother, my father, his mother, all of them--loved me just this much, because that is how hard I love them back...

(Even though...)

And something in me knows the love that this man has for me is the same.

... As for his own parent, whom he lost:

He remembers her drawing portraits for him. He tells me one night, some anonymous evening.

His mom drew portraits. Of him. Herself. Imaginary animals, moths in the lamplight, a hand shaded with crosshatch, flowery abstract shapes, his father. He wondered aloud whether his father had burnt the drawings, thrown them all away in his grief, since nothing remained of it in their apartment after the accident...nothing that he could recall. It would have been nice to have still.

But it's the memories.

_It's really something._

_What is?_ I ask.

_That you still remember her. Your mother, I mean._

I don't say anything, suddenly ashamed. But I do feel him take me inside the reach of his arm and nuzzle, and there's something special in his touch. Like a benediction, a protective seal, a kiss over the surface of something holy.

_You must have been a wonderful daughter, to wish they were here._

_I never--!_ I protest. I feel raw: red, and sad, and exposed.

 _ _I know_ it's true. And _you_ know..._ His sentence trails off. And then he laughs.

And then I ask if he loves me, right now? And will it be for a long while that he does, does he think? Will it be for as long as I will him, or as strongly?

But I already know.

The answers.

Yes. And _Yes._

...And _No._

(I take him, that night into a blessing of my own: the tightest of embraces, all full of sighs and laughter and laments.)

... _No._

Not as long.

…Not as much.

_(Not by a long shot.)_

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: This fic is ANCIENT, ara ma. I was feeling really nostalgic for my extended family, at the time. Sorry for all the vague description and (lbr) the *SAP.* Well, as long as you enjoyed ^_^ !


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